Warning: This review contains spoilers (if that is even possible with a “Nosferatu” film).
Robert Eggers is a celebrated “visualist”. But not a consummate storyteller. None of his four films offer a payoff. In “The Witch” at the end a girl flies a few meters vertically into the air. At the end of “The Lighthouse,” a man looks into a bright light. In “The Northman,” a Viking hunts his uncle, and in the finale they both attack each other. And in “Nosferatu”? We sense the end. A woman with the skin color and hairstyle of Isabelle Adjani pulls the vampire very close to her and doesn’t let him go.
Robert Eggers doesn’t necessarily want to retell the story of Count Dracula, also known in this country as Count Orlok and “Nosferatu”. A bold stance. At the time, the national football team said: Not everything should be different, but a lot should be better. Here too there are the superstitious Transylvanians known as “Gypsies”. The Tesla-like driverless carriage. The purchase contract (for a property that, somewhat poorly Germanized, is located in “Grünewald”), signed in front of a fireplace. A straitjacket prisoner who eats live animals. As well as the rats and the ship and then the plague.
Trailer – “Nosferatu”:
But some things should just be done differently. Otherwise Orlok will become Borelok. You have to rewrite classics, there’s no other way. Most recently, Kenneth Branagh failed with his three film attempts to retell Hercule Poirot stories one-to-one, i.e. to follow a literary story that is told completely in all film versions. Director and screenwriter Robert Eggers does a lot of things right. It avoids Hammer Horror spooky elements. No holy water, no mirror games, no crucifixes, no garlic, and, perhaps the biggest rule breaker, no fangs. And, to our greatest happiness: no repetition of what is probably the soapiest lecture with which the lonely count mistreats his stiff guest in every film. “Do you hear the children of the night? What music they make!”
Skarsgård is a one-trick pony
The credibility of a “Nosferatu” film also depends on the credibility of Nosferatu. How little Eggers seems to trust the expressive possibilities of his undead is shown by Bill Skarsgård’s commitment. Unlike the physiognomically similar Will Poulter, Skarsgård is a one-trick pony. As a mixture of muscular Borat, Naked Mulch and Mr. Burns, his chicken Nosferatu, which was grouchy from the start, perhaps deviates from the portrayals of Klaus Kinski and Max Schreck (and exposes all the online photos of this new Nosferatus that have been circulating for weeks as fan fantasies). But does Skarsgård play any other roles besides Pennywise or The Crow? Always keep your head down, your eyes squinting upwards. Basic course evil.
A fundamental mistake is the continuous use of jump scares. Murnau’s “Nosferatu” from 1922, like Herzog’s “Nosferatu” from 1979, does not have a single jump scare – this is often remembered differently. You don’t need jump scares either. The two old Nosferatus already looked terrifying. The most gruesome scene in Murnau’s film is not a sudden flash, but rather Nosferatu’s slow, relentless approach to his victim Thomas in bed. It is precisely because Thomas knows that the Count is taking his time, but he himself watches the slow steps from his bedchamber as if paralyzed, that the scene is so terrible. But here, in the new “Nosferatu”: Wham, Bam, Nosferatu jumps into the picture.
CG water and CG castle
Embedded in thoroughly computer-animated-looking landscapes (is a single element of the canal journeys taken from a real exterior shot?), CG oceans and a CG castle (if, as claimed, a real castle was used as the filming location – then at least one CG veil placed over it) the question arises as to whether the “visualist” Eggers was not a set builder with his conductor’s baton, but simply a team of programmers. Everything dipped in 4k shades of gray, like something out of a very expensive Netflix flick. Robert Eggers is not a Nolan.
“Elevated Horror” directors, including Eggers, comment on the political times in which people live today, but above all on the internal illnesses from which people today suffer. The character of Albin Eberhart Von Franz (Willlem Dafoe) alias van Helsing discusses the relationship between science and alchemy, religion and superstition. The year is 1838, and medicine is not in charge everywhere. Vampire hunter Von Franz also takes advantage of this, who, like his doctor colleague Sievers (Ralph Ineson), has difficulty correctly interpreting the plague (Coooooooovid!) and saving people.
Is that sexuality?
Egger’s biggest failure, however, is the conception of his main character Ellen (Lily-Rose Depp). Not because of her hair-raising sentences, the funniest of which is this: “How can I still cry – when all my tears have been shed?” Her non-rational, spell-induced lust for Count Orlok is, to put it carefully, not feminist. Women who are not allowed to live out their desires in baroque rule and for whom sexuality is supposed to be something malicious naturally appear frequently in historical films.
It’s not rocket science to interpret vampire films in such a way that the bloodsucker is a secret object of desire. Only: If the vampire looks as repulsive as this Nosferatu, and Ellen wants to be copulated by this vampire as hard as her beloved husband Thomas never could, in other words, if the Nosferatu becomes a symbol for her own sexuality – then sexuality becomes too something repulsive, even abnormal.
One can find the velvet coat vampire films, with Dracula as the charmer, i.e. with Frank Langella, Gary Oldman, sometimes even Christopher Lee, outdated and uncool. But they are vampires and it makes sense that you would like them. No creeps that a woman surrenders to because she’s been “enchanted.” Ellen initially only met Count Orlok in her nightmares, did not speak a single peaceful, let alone authoritarian sentence to him until her fatal embrace, and yet fell under his perverse spell. In the end, at least she is in control. About the monster on her chest.